In art class in my 1958 junior year of high school, my table-mate had a somewhat hard, yet beautiful face, set off with long, wavy, black hair.

She spoke in husky breaths, in a cigarette voice that fascinated me.

I remember she sat at the table some days in a cramped position, allowing for catnaps while holding her pencil, as if working.

I wish I recalled her name.

It's on the tip of my tongue.

Someday, I might.

She was off kilter, with quick glances, (my eyes only), over what was said in class sometimes.

My mystery girl was sort of gothic actually, in a time when absolutely no one was. Well, there was the Olive family who painted their two story Victorian black. All black. Well, and they also wore black too. All of them, all black. Hum. The Olive's were intriguing for the conservative '50's, that's for sure. After high school I knew Stanley Olive as a wonderful artist, when I studied with Phil Paradise.

Anyway, about my table-mate. I'm not sure she graduated. Her picture (as I remember her at least) is not present in my high school annuals.

One afternoon she did a watercolor on white paper of what seemed to be a potato against an oval background tinted yellow.

"What do you call it?"

Flipping over the paper, on the back she had written:

It just astonishes me to remember that radioactive writing, but I never forgot, because I think I knew what she meant.

And don't get me wrong, I was not a morose kid at all. I smiled and laughed a lot.

She did too.

Joking and all. Which I know today, was partly how I hid my pain.

And certainly, none of this was conscious.

I only see it in retrospect.

One of the things I find most interesting about the 50's was the iceberg of subtext we floated on.

In our quiet, conservative town of San Luis Obispo, California, what was going on in that girl's home?

How did she fare later in life?

I have often asked myself these questions.

When I was a young boy there were a lot of men in my hometown who wanted to touch my penis. It drove me into extreme neuroses, self hatred, suicidal binge drinking, drugs, prostitution, and psychotic breaks, which required decades of healing, until finally, I can sit here and write about it in relative peace at age 63.

It also drove me into art.

I have good days, and bad days. I'm bipolar, a crabapple tree at times, but I'm okay for a hermit.

Molesters told me: "don't tell".

It's all about fear.

No more.

I demand freedom.

When I was around ten, an evangelist minister from the Moody Bible Institute put on a weird science show in the Fremont Movie Theater.

Weird indeed.

Among other devices, he had a large Tesla coil that produced amazing displays of high voltage electricity arcing through the air. (note: I do not think this had anything to do with my later profession as an "electric painter," but it is at least worthy of mention) Anyway, using the machine to bring excitement to Bible verses, the preacher would flash an arc, then call, "And God Created the Heaven's and the Earth!"

Pretty corny.

Still, I was a kid.

I liked it.

After the show he invited people to accept Jesus as their personal savior, offering anyone who wanted salvation to join him, one at a time, behind the velvet curtains that led to the exit.

The "crowd" was sparse --- only about ten people.

I joined him, not realizing, the other folks were leaving.

In the dimly lit passageway behind the curtain, Bubba had a card-table set up with some booklets.

We sat flanking the table in folding chairs, backs against the wall, therefore, turning our heads to speak. I remember him asking if I attended church. We talked a bit. Mainly, was I ready, right then, to give my life to Jesus?

When I said yes, (which is odd when I think back on it now, because I did go to church with mom) anyway, the guy got up from his chair, came around the table, and knelt before me, as if to pray. Then he put his hands on my knees and started squeezing a bit, which I instantly sensed as, "off".

Then while he was praying to the Lord, his hands started crawling up my legs like land crabs, finally squeezing my crotch, and I just leaped like a rabbit through the curtains, and hopped up an empty aisle as fast as I could go.

Because Jesus was part of the twisted dynamic it shamed me to the core, still I sort of liked the stimulation.

In other words: it felt GOOD --- therefore, I was really BAD.

A classic case.

Shamed, spoiled, broken, and nasty, writhing in guilt over Jesus. He had said, "Let us pray together," and, I had lowered my head and closed my eyes in reverence to the Lord. I was going to Hell.

Many psychologists and psychiatrists explained this to me later, all of them saying just about the same thing.

The Moody Bible institute "preacher" actually jogged after me up the aisle that day, "... please David, here, I want you to have this". When I turned to take it, his face was bright red and his eyes looked ashamed.

The little Jesus booklet about two inches square he handed me was also bright red.

My mother saw it later and asked about it. I told her about the science show and the Moody Bible guy's electric preaching, leaving out his, "laying on of hands".

And I do forgive him today: for my ancestors; for MY healing. I tried everything else, and from experience, forgiveness is the only thing that actually works. And oh brother, it wasn't easy.

I'm serious.

The same goes for the next trombone as well.

Because, among others, I was also molested by Gilbert Brown, the owner of Brown's Music Store on Higuera Street in downtown San Luis Obispo. The same store where my mother bought me a plastic recorder called a "Tonette" for grammar school music class, and later, a ukulele.

Brown was in his mid-thirties with two daughters, and sang in the Episcopal church choir. I was around twelve, and in store collecting LP's (Teresa Brewer, Circus Band Music, Oklahoma!) with money earned from my "Telegram Tribune" paper route.

Having been molested before, it was like had a "jumper-sticker" on my back.

There were a couple of small listening booths in the back of the store. There, Brown always insisted that he handle all records and adjust the volume of the demo machine. There were no doors on the booths, control knobs were crotch level.

Whenever Brown reached to adjust the controls he would rub the back of his hand over my fly saying, "Do you like it louder ... like that ... or even a little louder?," pushing the back of this hand into me. He tried this with a couple of my young friends too, but they took off.

I pushed back one day.

Gil Brown did not know or care about my background, or that I was in dire need of professional help. To him I was just another opportunity, another likely prospect the right age.

And pushing back had nothing to do with "consent". This was frightening compulsion on my part, absolutely rooted in, coercive sex abuse from an older boy in the neighborhood, ongoing by then, for two years. Gilbert Brown to me was a scary "old" man with a spooky smell. I didn't like him, and certainly was not "attracted" to him.

It was 1953.

Us kids were still playing kick-the-can in the street. Television was so new we only got one channel on a twelve inch screen. I was showing "Andy Panda" cartoons on an 8 mm projector in my bedroom. I was a School Safety Patrol stool-pigeon. The popular TV show was Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. Tickets to the Saturday matinee at the Elmo Theater cost twelve cents each --- including a cowboy movie, a Flash Gordon serial, and 20 cartoons.

There was a dimly lit room in back of Brown's Music Store that had a smell I've never forgotten, a combination of his after-shave or cologne I think, (for most of my life I unconsciously avoided after-shaves) plus, the scent of wood polish or something, for musical instruments, I don't know, mingled with cleaning products for the store.

After some dreadful "fooling around" as he called it, when I was leaving the store, Brown said, "See you next time!"

I jumped on my bike and rode to my favorite hiding place, a pepper tree in a vacant lot not far from our house. And there I sat, boy next door, down, dirty, confused, vowing not to go back.

But I did. One day I was sitting in my tree again, so filled with shame, that later at dinner (because my brother was gone for some reason) I told my parents, of course, leaving out the gory details.

"He what!?" dad shouted.

"I was in the record booth and he pushed his hand against me, down there ... you know."

From embarrassment I simply could not tell of our storeroom encounters, or that I had been there a few times. I thought it was all my fault anyway, and that would have proved it. "He acts like he's going to turn the volume up, then he rubs me".

"Are you sure he's not just accidentally brushing against you?"

"He does it on purpose Dad".

After a silence my father's Norse thunder voice began to rumble, "I've got a mind to go down to that store tomorrow morning and rake that son of a bitch over the counter about seventeen times!"

If my father had acted on that legitimate impulse and raked Brown over the counter about seventeen times, my life might have turned out differently. I can't say. Perhaps not. I was already pretty far gone. We live with the wounds we are dealt in life, and we heal as best we can.

"Now, Palmer, you could get in a lot of trouble doing something like that ..." intoned mom, ever the Goddess of Neutrality.

A few days went by, nothing more was mentioned about it. I asked mom, "Did dad ever go to Brown's Music Store?"

"No, but he did talk to the police. We found out he was kicked out of the Boy Scouts for the same thing. The police said they are keeping an eye on him."

It must have been that eye with the pirate patch.

More likely, the one they sat on.

Because after many years of molesting dozens more hometown boys my perpetrator retired from his music store. He still lives in San Luis Obispo, where for decades he has sung in the Episcopal Church choir. As part of my therapy once, a psychologist had me write to him, asking for an apology, which of course, I never received. I did talk with a woman in his minister's office on the telephone one day. She informed me that they were aware of the problem. She also informed me that he had done time in prison for molestation. Then added, "It's an illness you know," a comment that sets my teeth.

Because it's NOT an illness.

It's a crime, like breaking the wings off a sparrow.

ILLNESS and MORALITY have been terribly confused by 12 Step Programs today. In fact, well meaning people, trying to relieve the stigma of substance abuse, not to mention overeating, gambling, even spending problems with money, to name but a few, have muddied cultural waters so badly by now, that even the most ghastly crime is often granted some sort of "illness" component, seized upon by defense attorneys and used like a mystic fog machine.

And I mean, a mystic fog machine to rival George I. Gurdjieff.

With a lifetime of survival knowledge under my belt, I say B.S.

Being victimized marks us.

Molested people are taboo, even to themselves.

It's just awful.

If people know you were molested as a child, half of them wonder about you, which hurts.

REALLY hurts.

It's a terrible load of psychological crap to haul around. So we keep it all inside where it turns into depression, and ulcers, and heart attacks.

Yes, many people who molest, were in fact molested, (HOWEVER) most importantly, most people who were molested, do NOT molest.

If it was a pie chart, molesters who were molested would be one slice, while us survivors, nearly the whole rest of the damn pie!

And we don't speak up. Why would we? It makes everyone, including us, uncomfortable. It can clear a room in about 20 seconds. I'm an artist though, so it's my obligation.

Us survivors live by healing a "soul sickness" that somehow, must be overcome, or absorbed, or integrated, or purged, or all of the above. I have lived a life making "soul repairs" on myself, on the run, if you will, like trying to fix a sinking submarine before hits bottom and gets stuck in a thousand feet of mud.

I have always wanted to live fully, and be free of my unfortunate past. Free of what criminals put on me. Free of the bruise, the mark.

It was not my fault.

It is my work.

Ghandi was right. Resentment only breeds more resentment, never healing. I demand life's healing, period, even if only for twenty minutes.

I am living a second life now, a quiet one, happily with Janie, my old Rhodesian Ridgeback hound, in a little house in the countryside, where I write stories, poems, songs, and paint, and draw, and make movies. I had to work very hard on myself to get here, safe, whole, healed and free.

I want to encourage others to hang in there too, and keep finding help until you get ALL the way through your own personal healing.

It is more than worth the struggle.

It really is.

My demons had to pack up and move out. For a man who was fueled by anger for the better part of his life, I cannot tell you how sweet it feels to have had that negativity transmuted through remorse, sorrow, forgiveness, and humor, into wholesomeness.

I have light in my heart now, illuminating and neutralizing everything unlike itself, period.

I'm not bragging, I'm amazed.

Don't miss it.

Keep healing.

Love, David

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